Posts

"Diz, please shoot this Executioner if he shoots my cyno. He has me yellow boxed."

"Okay." Diz undocks in a Sleipnir since he goes for subtle.

I was doing my normal cyno duties. I had stuff to drop off for the corporation, stuff to drop off for other people, and my store to manage. It was a multiple cyno type of day. I love my cyno ships and unlike many I don't log them off or self destruct them. I believe in the beauty of a reusable cyno. "He's shooting me." I whined. "Half shield. Quarter shield." The executioner turns into a wreck.

"He popped before I could shoot him," said Diz.

"Well, that's fine too."

My cyno went down. I switched to a faster, more nimble ship and looted his wreck. I found the wreck name ironic.

First a Algos the other week and now an Executioner and I think there was an Slasher that managed to warp away... So much death. All of these things are dying to my mighty cyno frigate. I am like a ph…

There is something blissful about the end of a long train. It is almost as pleasurable as the first long, body arching stretch in the morning. When Aura for Android chimed that Sugar's skill queue had dropped under twenty four hours, I could have burst into song for the joy of it. However, I will leave the bursting into song for Kaeda and just burn in satisfaction.
Sugar is finishing Sentry Drone Interfacing V. This gives access to T2 Sentry Drones. It is an important skill for many reasons. Some will cry drone assist but I'll roll my eyes. Sentry drones are necessary for several of our battleship doctrines and for our Ishtar fleets. They give me access to another large weapon option as well. Heavy drones have their place but their slow speed is a hindrance in fast paced small gang PvP. Although static, sentries provide a wide range of options. It also moves me that much closer to my goal of being well rounded.
Learning T2 skills is a pain. I will plug in Heavy Assault Cruise…

PvP. PvP. Hear it. Smell it. Breath it. It is the hunt. The hunter. The tales of stalking the darkness for the sweet burst of the kill. It sprawls out of the game onto the forums and the blogs. The prey is discussed. Their actions dissented. Suggestions are made. Come play. Come fight. Come die.

It is nice to look on the other side. The ones that got away. I was presented with a forum post from the Eve Online Forums that was not the tears of the victim but the tears of the hunter. They were sweet. Succulent. Almost too rich for digestion. They had to be savored. Post after post. Comment after comment. A threadnought rose in monolithic tear soaked glory from general discussion.

Rubicon has introduced personal, mobile structures. Space houses. On Twitter, various developers have been trickling stacks, information, and comments about the use of these new features. As a player, I can say that they have entered into my conscious and strategies are being built around them. They have interes…

"Don't fly what you can't afford to lose."
-said every Eve warning ever Afford To be able to do, manage, or bear without serious consequence or adverse effect: The country can't afford another drought.There is age old wisdom in Eve online. In the wide, arched hallways of the Rookie Academies grizzled veterans stand before classes of bright eyed pilots. The air crackles with excitement. Beyond the room is space. A vast stretch of distance filled with an improbable level of options. The future is there, spread away from the undock of the station. The moment to experience it is now.Within each of those pilots is a series of plans. Some are nebulous things created of particles and energy with no true form other than the beauty of random existence. Many are formed even if that form is soft and unstructured. They know their goals, their wants, and their desires. All they wait for is experience and time...
I was chatting in OUCH's chatroom and the statement that &qu…

... and that is how we wound up shooting an offline tower voluntarily. The End.

Now for the beginning.

There are many reasons to join a corporation in Eve Online. The structure of the game is not kind to the solo player. The game it also very, very lonely. I've argued in my defense for local that the simple ability to see other people and know that you are not alone is more important than any number of information gathering or strategic reasons to remove local chat. Nor is local chat only a place of smack talk, scams, and negativity. I had a lovely chat with some boys from Northern Associates. who were camping Bosena's gate for some reason and asked me to write about them (wink).

Loneliness kills off new players. Communities invest them in the game. This is demonstrated by groups that create a social environment to bring the player in and give them a home. It is one reason why many have a hard time leaving the warm comfort of Eve University despite the corporation's goal t…

They say that any publicity is good publicity. I've never been fond of the concept. I'm also not a marketing expert or a publicity lord. Still, when Vov tossed me a link for a Quitting Eve post I was fascinated when I realized that my boys were the mechanism of this particular posters post about his decision to leave Eve.

The TL;DR is that he died in a Stratios to my boys in Bosena. He had returned to Eve to try the expansion, sold enough stuff to buy a Stratios and died while out exploring.

I do like to find out why people decide they are quitting the game, especially when they point out not only my piece of space but my corpmates as the reason.

I hunted down one of people on the killmail to find out what happened. With two interceptors I was interested in how he had died. The post pointed at gatecamps. I know that two of the people on that killmail do not have the interest or attention span to camp a gate. It is one of those assumptions about 'low sec gates' are all …

A mature tropical cycloneBackground
The domestication of the Typhoon was undertaken early into the settlement of the Minmatar Republic. These massive beasts flourished all through the area, floursing under the rich red nebula. However, Typhoons often form loose social groups accross vast territories. For all of their size and bulk they slip away into the depths of space with surprising speed and grace.

Early domestication efforts proved fustrating. The few beasts that domesticated were notoriously hard to train. Often, a trainer could not get them to focus and had to split their knowledge accross multiple weapons systems. This led to the belief that they were unintellegent and while powerful in battle to high maintaince to invest in. For the few souls that spent the time and energy they were often rewarded with beasts of war of the like few could place upon the field. By the time a Typhoon was fully trained for combat the pilot was often no l…

Every now and then I get excited and pretend that I can make graphs and such things. In truth I'm terrible at it. That is why I stick to writing about my market stuff. But, returning to Bosena and sinking back into the market as well as being almost nine months into the project of running a market seemed like a good time to look at some of the charts.

This is a very good example of what happened when I left Bosena for a month and a half. We deployed during the first days of October and returned halfway through November. The steady push upward after the steady pull down. is obvious. Large Shield Extender II's are a staple module.

The year view is also very interesting. The high arch in February of 2013 is one of the things that drove me to start Bosena's market. Prices in the general area were just going up and up and up at this point after downward pressure from Sard's running Bosena.

This is one item that has a nice, clear graph for my topic. Other items show the sam…

I crouch upon a fork in the road and two paths lay before me.One is wide and clean and straight with all the things I know.The other vanishes into the unknown.Both roads hold my attention. One is safe and sane. The unknown path is now swept in rain.At my feet are equal choices. Nether is right. Nether is wrong.And in my soul there are choices. Dozens upon hundreds.

When I was in high school part of my grade was 'notebook organization'. Basically, there was a way that
they wanted your notebook to be structured. Warm Up exercises, handouts, notes, homework assignments were all to be placed and labeled correctly as per the instructions given at the start of the year. Any deviation was marked off. This was 30% of the grade in the classes it was assigned to. Let us say that I was never a straight A student.

One of the things that I hated about the organization grades was that it was forced organization. Having all of my items, being able to get to access and use my items, was unimportant. In the formal structure of public education they had to be done in a particular order each time. Heaven forbid individuality. Being terrible at conforming and stubborn about things that are stupid and pointless, I was not able to comply. I believed that I was terribly disorganized because I could never get everything and keep everything how they wanted.
Whe…

Last weekend, as we planned to return to Molden Heath, I started to turn the full focus of my market effort back to Bosena. I had dropped down to about a sixty percent attention span while deployed. I'd love to say that I managed both markets at full productivity but that would be a complete lie. I learned that one, steady market occupied the bulk of my free game time. I am not going to miss fleets for my market for instance and as such my own activities limit me to a certain extent.

Now, I am back to take Bosena in my steely grip. The people who were living in Bosena while we were gone had settled in nicely. They were doing a fine, quick business. However, rumor is that they moved out the weekend we were returning home because they didn't want to share a station with my boys who base out of Bosena.

After running a split market I saw a true need for even more market orders. I think the biggest pit of running this thing is the sheer number of market orders. It seems that every …

The world has changed. Instead of writing a long review or something I just had a bunch of little points that have been nosing about my mind. Some flared into existence today. Others I've been thinking about. None of it is comprehensive or in order."God it feels like I'm driving a dead, drunk cow," was heard on coms. That was the general reaction to anything larger than a cruiser with the warp speed changes.I refuse to touch any of my freighters for the next few weeks. I will take the hit of contracting my stuff out to others. The BPC frenzy is in full swing and I do not want to dip my toes in those waters.Vov is debating selling his Machariel. The warp speed changes are slow enough to make it no longer worth flying. His escape route of getting out has been severely compromised. The agility of the ship will no longer allow it to be the bad ass skirmish boat that it was, he feels.I had a little speech on coms about why the Stratios isn't useless. The general feeli…

Engaging : very attractive or pleasing in a way that holds your attention
Often Eve is defined as immersive. That is a staple of any successful MMO. Time is lost as the player sinks into the game world. That is part of the draw. The daily world is shed for one of difference. But is that world also engaging? Does it capture the mind and wrap it up in a tight cocoon of interest and focus? Eve seems to do that quite well.

While Eve is immersive it may be the engagement factor that draws people back. There are times when I lean back, watching my ship spin about the screen and wonder what catches me so. But then, I will read stories of day to day life or write my own and I am reminded of what draws the players in. For players without stories often become bored because they never captured the engagement of Eve.

I was reading a forum post as someone discussed cloaking up to capture someone that was going to a Faction Warfare complex. As he explained what he was doing, which was cloaking besi…

Well not quite yet. Roigon ran a hangar clearing fleet. A chunk of the corporation has already moved back to Molden Heath. That fight earlier in the week was a beacon and the irresistible cry of red space has sucked in a few. We cleared contracts and started to undock things. I managed to die a few jumps out. I missed a jump command at one point and sat on a gate as the other fleet landed. Oh well. Omen down.
I switched into a Thorax and we spun through the area. I've never learned the layout of Syndicate. Everyone else just rattles off system names and who lives where. For me, each time is a mystery. The random jumble of letters and numbers with occasional dashes does nothing for me but irritate.
I've become used to bubbles. I have no love for them yet. I know that some are greatly successful with bubble traps and using them to snare s…

With steely eyes and razor smiles the Jaguar lays above its prize.-Sugar Kyle

Dave asked for a Jaguar roam two weeks ago. Of course, I choose a day that he had to go to work. However, the idea seemed good. We would be headed back to Molden Heath soon. A few organized fleets at the end would help us leave on a positive, productive note. It is easy for deployments to drag out and start to go stale. That leaves a bad taste at the end and creates resistance the next time.
I posted the op for a Jaguar fleet. I corralled my fleet commander and I then promptly forgot about it. After the fight back in Molden Heath on Wednesday, the boys were scattered to the winds and getting them back to Syndicate seemed futile. On Friday, however, I was asked what time the fleet would be. I peered at the forums and saw that people wanted to fly. Oh. I picked a time and sat down in Jita to take care of the serious business of buying the fleet.
For some reason people kept asking me if I was going to FC the fl…

Bounty paymentFrom: CONCORDSent: 2013.11.17 03:24For your termination of Sugar Kyle we have paid you 0.09 ISK from their bounty pool.
The question is, how did I come across this massive bounty on myself? For this Bounty mail came to my own mail box. Let me explain.

First, you have to go back about forty minutes. Then, understand that this was the second fleet of the day. See that, I was snuggled down in the logistics and market channel exchanging violin music with Wex as I finished cleaning up Bosena's neglected corners. My productivity was amazing when Jabber pings started going off and people appeared in the quiet depths to tell me to get in a Stiletto and be sociable.

I went and got some hot chocolate (candycane hot chocolate), stepped into my Stiletto and undocked with the fleet. Ishtar fleet it was and I was tackle. I'm still two weeks off of T2 sentries. I didn't mind. I was the only tackle and the FC sent me forward. Not a big deal. I jumped and my overview filled w…

" I know you are not in the teaching noobs business and so on, I just had to ask since I am looking to build a market and JF seems a really important tool, do you know of any online guides or resources I could look at before investing in one?"
-Questions from Eve Mail
I actually love teaching when I have something to teach. I hang out in Eve Uni Public Help chat for this very reason. I also like a lot of the people there. But really, I am there to answer the endless questions that are asked time and time again. Someone has to. I believe in investing in the future. For me to have Eve to play I need to have other people also playing Eve. A bit of time when I'm idle scanning the window and answering questions is valuable time spent, in my opinion. I have what I have to give and I give of it freely.

But jump freighters. I have opinions in lieu of guides or resources and hopefully that will do. Most of the resources available are about planning your jumps. Jump Freighter…

I have not Gizoogled patch notes in a while.
Warning for those who have never seen me do this. I run the patch note page through a translation site aka Gizoogle and paste the results here. If you don't find it amusing, skip this post. Its obnoxious and it is hilarious. The real patch notes are here. I suggest everyone give them a read. For those who want the 'real' version as I call the gizoogled ones they are below the cut.

Sometimes, the person needs the ISK and selling it will allow them to avoid the market. The sale is also immediate. At the same time the buyer received the discounted item. They know that their ISK is going to their friend/acquaintance instead of a random player on the market. In a game where passions run high, sometimes seeing who you brought from on the market can cause an irritated curl of the lip.

I purchased a Vindicator from Kaeda the other day. The Syndicate exploration content has rained Vindicators down upon the corporation. I didn't bring any PvE ships with me. I didn't realize we'd have such a fertile ground to PvE. Kaeda decided to cook and sell the Vindicators with first dips to corpmates. The price was good and I picked one up. Like my Machariel, it will just hang around until one day I might use it. But, I like it. Next I need a Bhaalgorn and I'll be happy when it comes to pirate Battleships.

Back in August, right after we first got Jabber, DP posted a link to a personality test. Personality tests are always amusing. This particular one was, "What Kind of D&D Character Would You Be?" And of course, it was not a short test and takes about forty minutes.

Lots of us ran off and took it. It was a pretty interesting mix of results but almost everyone was some form of Wizard/magic users that charted towards some form of good. Me? I was a true neutral ranger. I doubt that is how many would imagine us. The low sec, PvP corporation. I leave pirate off of our label. Many of us consider ourselves, at the core, pirates but our corporation is PvP small to medium gang oriented.

The concept of "who" and "what" one is comes up a lot in Eve. The other day I babbled a lot about ISK and mentioned Rhavas'. Rhavas decided to make categories for the members of low sec and Kaeda and I demanded that he make one that we truly fit into. Very few people fit into…

The end of the story is that we lost five dreds and two carriers to a trap that we stepped into with our eyes wide open. It turned out to be as much fun as we were hoping it would be. We'll need to buy a few new carriers and dreadnoughts.

Oh Molden Heath, how we missed you. Red space is the best space. Splashing the blood of our capital fleet around will hopefully lead to fertile fields later.

The fight was over a POCO. Sometimes, I forget that they are there to do more than bait fights. It seemed like a good idea. A dozen were already logged into the system. A fight, a fight, a fight. That is what led back to the frantic jumps back to Molden Heath. It seemed like a guarantied fight. While we moved everyone we started inviting people. Last night, Late Night invited us. It seemed as if we could do the same thing. Pings went out and chats were opened. We're not a large cor…